Jack Black's Unmade Green Lantern Comedy Gave the Ring to a Reality TV Contestant

Green Lantern almost became a straight comedy starring Jack Black, built around the joke that the ring picks the completely wrong person for the job. It was written by Robert Smigel, the former SNL writer known as the puppeteer and voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and it never made it to a screen.

Warner Bros approached Smigel with the idea of turning Green Lantern into a comedy in the first place. The joke, as Smigel saw it, was that unlike most superheroes, becoming Green Lantern required no physical ability at all. He simply had to possess the ring, which meant an immature idiot could suddenly wield one of the most powerful weapons in the universe. The studio also told him to write the lead role with Jack Black in mind, and Black eventually signed on after reading the script, despite his initial hesitations.

Abin Sur's Ring Searches the Globe and Picks a Reality Show Contestant

The script opens with Abin Sur crash landing on Earth and dying inside the wreckage of his spacecraft. With his last breaths, he commands his ring to search the planet for a successor who is both fearless and honest. The ring sweeps across the globe, passing over a soldier running into a fire to save his friend, a legless climber scaling a mountain, and an elderly missionary delivering a baby while fighting off a wildebeest.

Instead of any of them, the ring settles on Jud Platt, a clerk in his early 30s who works at an IKEA-style furniture store. It finds him on a television inside a bar, where he is appearing on a trashy reality show. On screen, Jud is aggressively eating the raw, hairy, severed head of a coyote while the host screams, "Jud Platt does not know fear." That is apparently enough for the ring, which immediately transports him to Abin Sur's crash site.

Jud Platt Assumes He Is Hallucinating When Abin Sur Names Him Successor

Face to face with a dying alien, Jud assumes he is hallucinating, pulls out his phone, and calls his friend, asking, "What did we take the other day? How much NyQuil did I have? Can it have a delayed reaction?" Meanwhile Abin Sur tries to deliver a cosmic speech about a power greater than Jud's finite mind can imagine, explaining that Jud has been chosen as his successor. When Jud tries to explain that the ring made a mistake, the dying alien responds, "Please, do not bore me in my final minutes."

Over the phone, his friend refuses to believe any of it, telling Jud, "You're Green Lantern? Come on, that's like the ninth most important superhero. Put the dying guy on." It is worth noting the script takes place in a world where Green Lantern already exists as a comic book character, which is why his friend knows the mythology. When Jud hands the phone over, Abin Sur starts explaining the ring's 24-hour recharge cycle, but his friend cuts him off because he already knows it from the comics. A giant green hand then bursts out of his friend's earpiece and drags him physically through the phone line, sending him flying headfirst out of Jud's cell phone.

The Ring Transfers to Jud Moments After Abin Sur Dies

While the two of them argue, Abin Sur finally dies, and his body immediately begins decomposing into dust, causing the supposedly fearless Jud Platt to start vomiting on the floor. In the middle of this, the ring lifts off Abin Sur's finger, flies across the ship, and slips onto Jud's hand. The Green Lantern suit instantly materializes around him, leaving Jud standing in full superhero costume with vomit still hanging out of his mouth, which makes his friend burst out laughing.

The two head into the desert so Jud can figure out how his new powers work. He discovers the ring can create basically anything he imagines, making giant fists, swords, and nunchucks before using them to mess with his friend. When his friend challenges him to create something complicated that he knows intimately, Jud concentrates and produces a full life-size green recreation of Britney Spears, prompting his friend to just stare and ask, "Really?" By the time they leave the desert, Jud has gone from refusing to be Green Lantern to fully embracing it.

Jud Uses His Powers to Fast-Forward Dates Instead of Fighting Crime

Rather than fighting crime, Jud mostly treats the ring as a shortcut for making his own life easier. Because he has a thing for the manager at the furniture store where he works, he starts using the ring to impress her. On a date with her, Jud gets bored with the conversation and uses the ring to literally fast-forward through it so he can skip ahead to making out. His friend later points out that Jud has been given incredible power and should probably be doing something more important with it, but Jud does not particularly care.

The Guardians Summon Jud to Oa, Where Sinestro Immediately Despises Him

All the while, the Guardians of the Universe are watching Jud from planet Oa through their monitors. The Green Lantern Corps slowly realize that the man Abin Sur's ring selected to wield one of the most powerful weapons in the universe is, in the script's own framing, an immature idiot. Eventually the Guardians decide they have seen enough and forcibly beam Jud across the universe to Oa.

Jud materializes in full uniform surrounded by dozens of alien Corps members and immediately pulls out his cell phone to call his friend. When Tomar-Re, an orange-beaked alien Lantern, tells him there is no chance his phone will work there, Jud confidently replies, "It's Verizon." He is then introduced to the rest of the Corps, including Sinestro, who instantly despises him. When the Guardians try to explain the Corps' history using an enormous book of accumulated knowledge, Jud falls asleep almost immediately, so they simplify things with a giant monitor and a troop of Muppet-style puppets singing an educational song about a race of giant hive-mind ants once imprisoned behind an energy barrier after the Guardians forbade genocide. Jud loves the puppet show, applauding before asking, "What does this all have to do with me?"

Kilowog's Training Turns Into Frat-Brother Antics

Jud is assigned to Kilowog, an eight-foot-tall, six-hundred-pound Lantern responsible for training new recruits, and he is terrible at it at first. Things improve once Jud realizes the ring does not require him to fight conventionally. When Kilowog fires a giant boulder at him, Jud protects himself by conjuring a pair of cross-haired stone legs from Basic Instinct. When Kilowog opens fire with a machine gun, Jud blocks the bullets with an endless line of green Secret Service agents who leap in front of him and take the shots.

That is somehow what finally wins Kilowog over, and their training quickly devolves into the two of them behaving more like frat brothers than intergalactic police officers.

Sinestro Reveals He Rigged the Selection and Declares Himself Ruler of Earth

Jud eventually returns to Earth, but Sinestro follows him to his apartment, which he is disgusted by, revealing that he is a neat freak. Sinestro then turns on Jud, blasts the ring off his finger, and tells him he was never worthy of becoming a Green Lantern in the first place. Sinestro confesses that Jud was only chosen because he had deliberately blocked Abin Sur's original distress call, preventing a real Lantern from reaching him in time, and that he picked Jud specifically because he believed Jud was an impulsive idiot who would prove humanity unworthy of the ring.

Sinestro then hijacks televisions around the world, declares himself ruler of Earth, and announces that humanity will now live under absolute order, triggering immediate chaos.

Jud Loses the Ring and Has to Protect His Family With No Powers at All

With no powers and nowhere else to go, Jud returns home to his parents, who live above the pharmacy they own. As people riot and loot, neighbors break into the pharmacy, and for the first time in the script, Jud has no ring and has to protect his family himself. He fights dirty, biting into the tendons behind a looter's knee, pouring rubbing alcohol on his own shirt and setting himself on fire to scare off another attacker, then drinking ipecac so he can vomit all over the people attacking him.

Ridiculous as it is, it proves something the ring had apparently seen in Jud from the beginning. When he is finally forced to be brave without any powers at all, the ring recognizes him as worthy and flies back onto his finger.

The Final Battle Pits the Corps Against Sinestro and a Yellow Pikachu Hive Mind

Jud flies into the sky to confront Sinestro, who is using an enormous network of green amplifiers to broadcast his new rules across the planet. Their fight escalates into increasingly stupid constructs until Sinestro gets the upper hand and prepares to kill Jud. Jud then creates the one thing he knows will truly terrify Sinestro, a completely disheveled version of him with ripped clothes and no regard for personal hygiene, which kicks the real Sinestro in the face, destroys his hair, and picks its teeth before flicking the gunk at him. Sinestro flees, and Kilowog intercepts him over a farm, blasting open a silo and burying him under yellow grain, which neutralizes Green Lantern powers, just as a swarm of yellow baby chicks descends on top of him.

At the same time, the imprisoned race of hive-mind ants escapes and heads for Earth to kill Sinestro in revenge, reshaping their yellow form into a giant Pikachu as a tactical distraction. Their plan is simply to destroy the entire planet along with Sinestro, regardless of the billions of people caught in the middle. Because Pikachu is yellow, none of the Lanterns can destroy it with their rings, so Jud instead gets behind Earth and physically pushes the planet out of its path. The Pikachu misses, but moving Earth off its axis triggers earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, and fires.

Realizing he has made things worse, Jud conjures a fully functioning green Superman and sends him flying around Earth exactly like the ending of the 1978 Superman film, reversing time and restoring the planet, but also sending the giant Pikachu back along its original trajectory. Jud then has to fly directly into its path while the rest of the Corps concentrates their power around him, and the resulting explosion destroys the creature and saves Earth, with Jud surviving in the wreckage.

Jud Wipes His Family's Memory and Falls for a Fellow Lantern

Back on Oa, Sinestro is put on trial and banished to the antimatter universe, while Jud is informed that he has somehow officially completed basic training. Once he returns to Earth, realizing his family could become targets because of him, Jud uses the ring to erase their memories of ever learning he is Green Lantern. The moment the green light fades, his mother immediately goes back to treating him like a disappointment and comparing him unfavorably to his brother.

Back on Oa, Jud and Kilowog go out to celebrate at Oa's most exclusive restaurant, where the signature delicacy turns out to be a platter of raw, hairy coyote heads. Without hesitation, a Lantern named Katma Tui grabs one and eats it. Jud watches in amazement, and just like that, he is smitten.

Why Jack Black's Green Lantern Was Scrapped for the Ryan Reynolds Version

After Batman Begins came out in 2005 and Superman Returns in 2006, Warner Bros began wondering whether a one-off comedy was the right way to bring Green Lantern to the big screen, versus a serious film with the potential for sequels and a larger franchise. When the studio gave Smigel notes for a second draft, executives asked about removing Green Lantern from the script altogether and turning it into an original superhero comedy instead. Smigel argued against that, believing the comedy only worked if Jud was being dropped into the real Green Lantern mythology.

When the script leaked onto the internet, it was met with negative reaction from fans. Warner Bros then decided to scrap it entirely and pivoted to a more serious Green Lantern film, which was released in 2011 starring Ryan Reynolds.